SIRI
RISING
co-founders Gruber, as chief technology officer, and Cheyer, as vicepresident of engineering.
Siri’s founding trio required
prospective hires to read MIT professor Michael Dertouzos’s The
Unfinished Revolution, a treatise
arguing for “human-centric computing” and devices that “truly
serve us, instead of the other way
around.” If an applicant didn’t
agree with Dertouzos’ thesis, he
or she wasn’t a match for Siri.
Once hired, new Siri employees
were handed an empty frame and
instructed to keep a photo on their
desks of the person whose vision
most inspired their work. Cheyer
framed a picture of another tech visionary who preached the “people
first” mentality: Doug Engelbart.
Siri secured $8.5 million from
investors in early 2008 and its
progress over the following months
was “absolutely breathtaking,”
says Morgenthaler, the early Siri
investor. Shawn Carolan, a partner at Menlo Ventures and another
Siri backer, recalls, “Every board
meeting was a breakthrough.”
The founders enlisted their Siri
prototype in a rigorous artificialintelligence boot camp of their
own design, one meant to train
the assistant to understand, in-
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
terpret and answer queries. When
asked a question, Siri, which processed information in a remote
data center, would send the audio of the speaker’s question to a
server, where speech recognition
software would “transcribe” the
spoken words.
Siri then had to figure out the
words’ meaning — what computer
scientists call natural language
“THEIR SHARED OBJECTIVE:
IMPROVE TECHNOLOGY IN
ORDER TO MAKE PEOPLE
BETTER AT WHAT THEY DO,
NOT TO REPLACE HUMANS
WITH MACHINES.”
processing. People have dozens
of ways of asking the same thing,
and while humans can deduce
that the phrases, “I’m in the mood
for a croissant,” “Is there a bakery
nearby?” and “Some French pastries would be nice,” all arrive at
the same point, it takes a highly
sophisticated algorithm to reach
that same conclusion.
The more traditional, errorprone approach to natural language processing interpreted
meaning by identifying the parts